A Complete Guide to eCommerce Strategies for Holiday Season

If you are in the eCommerce business, it’s the perfect time to gear up and align your strategies to make the most of the holiday season. While holidays happen to be one of the most exciting times for the people in the US, it is also a merry-making time for eCommerce entrepreneurs.

As the pandemic has reshaped the lives of every individual and business worldwide, it has additionally changed many trends; however, the eCommerce industry is the most affected business sector due to consumers’ new shopping patterns. The move toward internet business was occurring before COVID-19, yet as per the latest information from IBM, the pandemic has quickened customers’ shift towards the eCommerce platform to avail the required services. This leads to a drastic boom in the online demand for goods and services.

The novel Coronavirus has brought the biggest twist in businesses that leads to new market demands. To address the increased consumers’ requirements, the industries should follow the latest trends. Let’s check out some of the trendy ways to empower eCommerce sales for the festive season and beyond.

Enhanced virtual experience

A virtual platform is the only way for consumers to get details and analyze your product. eCommerce brands must modify their PDPs using augmented reality and Virtual Reality implementation. This leads to maximized sales, higher conversions, boosted sales, and lower product returns.

Quick Checkout

Using AI technology, flashing an instant shopping option anywhere on the platform enables buyers to make a conversion. This technological advancement can also analyze the customer’s checkout preference and their actions performed on different devices. It converts a new customer into a potential one.

Improve Digital Interaction

Artificial Intelligence is a jack of all trades. AI can help online businesses to enhance digital media experience by user-generated video and images to replicate window shopping visits.

Geographical Diversification

Covid 19 is a global issue. In such a scenario it’s hard for people to go out or shop for their desired products and services. People are still under house arrest and are following the lockdown or social distancing protocols. Geographical expansion is much needed to roll out your web stores to new regions and markets.

Deal With Increasing Demands

With transportation restrictions and increased online demands, it’s the biggest challenge to supply at every nook and corner. Here are the right ways that will help you in supply chain disruption:

• Display real-time stock and pricing details
• Delay the loading of certain web page elements
• Make sure that you have the right e-store that supports your website.
• Let customers track their delivery time and updates.
• Load Balancing- Make smart use of technological advancements and machines to take the pressure off.
• Mark out-of-stock items and inform your customer when they can expect to get it back in the e-Store.

Strict Safety Measures

Contactless delivery is the best option for consumers’ safety. Offer online payment methods to your customers to avoid physical money exchange, receiving paper receipts, and following the new hygiene measures.

Having said that, it is clear that you need to employ measures and significant strategies in order to lure customers and witness sales, But before that, let’s have a quick rundown at which the term eCommerce strategy actually means?

Is Your eCommerce Store Holiday Ready?

To help you visualize better, the designing and structuring of an eCommerce website in a way that can attract customers and compel them to make a purchase is what we mean by eCommerce strategies. With growing competition and a rising number of eCommerce websites, you need to be different to stand out in the crowd. On average, there are nearly 24 million active eCommerce stores, and the likelihood of your site popping up as the first choice of customers is a tough nut to crack.

Even if a customer visits your online store, it doesn’t guarantee a sale. A customer landing on your store is just the start, and there’s a lot more to work on, post-acquisition. It is seen that around 70% of the customers drop off a website within a week. Meaning that your work isn’t just attracting consumers but also engaging the,m and in a way that they close a deal.

In case you are worried about what to do and how to do, this piece is designed specifically for store leaders like you. We take you down the journey of eCommerce strategies that you should consider to integrate within your online store.

Dry Run Your Store Performance With These eCommerce Strategies – Factors Influencing Sales

• Create an Omnichannel Presence

Post-industrialization 4.0, the trend of going online has increased to the extent where customers are present everywhere. What this means is that users seek the omnichannel brand presence and, likewise, engagement. Where some might be more active on Instagram, others would prefer Facebook. If you think that creating your brand presence on either of the available channels would be enough to attract users, you are missing out on the big picture. To ensure that your presence on different social media channels helps you gain traffic, incorporate strategies as:

• Announce discounts and offers through social media channels.
• Pitch customized emails to the customers, notifying them about major updates on products, orders, etc.
• Distribute your product catalog on different social media channels to attract user attention.

Attract Prospects Through Email Marketing

Get started with the process of marketing your products. You might have been using multiple channels to mediate your products to the customers, it’s time to redesign each campaign and draft them in a way that accounts for conversion. Dropping an email in the inbox would not serve your purpose right, and so, you need to take up certain measures to ensure that the pitched emails can intimidate users to click open, read, and convert.

• Curate personalized emails, one that is specifically designed for the customer, highlighting the relevance of the product.
• Offer gift cards, early-bird discounts, and quick delivery for first-n shoppers or the ones who purchase before a specific date.
• Keep your email subject line attractive and direct to the point. Something like, ‘grab before it’s too late’ or ‘be the first to get a product free’.
• Call-to-action needs to take them to your store. No jargon words and no fancy terms.

Adhere To The Abundance of Mobile Shoppers

Around 40% of the buyers in the US purchased mobile phones back in 2018, so before you pick up the curtains and reveal your online store, make sure your site is mobile-compatible. Even if you succeeded in luring the visitor to click your email and head out to the site, if it isn’t compatible with the mobile device, all your efforts would go in vain.

So, make sure that your store has a mobile version to offer customers the ease to shop, at a time most convenient to them.

• Ensure the mobile version of your store is easy to use and highly intuitive.
• Add significant titles and keywords to boost mobile SEO.
• Optimize your site content to be compatible with voice search.

Optimize The Checkout Process

Experiencing cart abandonment isn’t a new thing, but who would like to see a low conversion rate at a time, which is most favorable to pitch higher sales, right? One of the most important reasons why customers leave their carts is the tedious checkout process. A website that offers customers the ease of making a single-click purchase succeeds in retaining customers. To streamline the checkout experience of your customers, embed the following strategies:

• Create a shorter web form, eliminating the need to fill in information.
• Enlist multiple options of payment offering users the ease to pay on the go. Where debit and credit cards are the most common form of payments, third party integration apps are also on the roll, so make sure your store gives customers the convenience to shop on the go.
• Display all shipping information, and be sure that the fees charged for shipping are near normal.
• Enable an infrastructure where users can purchase as a guest, or if you require a login, embed one-click social media sign-in for faster engagement.

Optimize Site To Sustain Traffic

Supposing that you have been through most of the challenges, and there is a huge footfall on your eCommerce site. Now, retaining them and winning over their trust is a huge obstacle. To attract users, you need to have a secure site and one that can sustain the traffic. Of course, it is the holiday season, and thousands of customers are visiting your store, but is your store capable of sustaining the traffic or functioning seamlessly, irrespective of the user count? If not, you need to modify the store to make it holiday-ready.

• Resize the images of the products uploaded on the site to ensure faster downloads and prevent website breaks in case of higher traffic.
• Reset the setting and allow full page caching. This loads the page even if the connectivity is low or suffers from a poor network zone.
• In case your website is hosted on the cloud, expand your cloud capacity to accommodate more traffic.

Website Security

In the end, is your website secured, or are the payment methods encrypted enough to protect customers’ data? People today are more concerned about data privacy, and hence, make sure that your online store:

• Has SSL-certified hosting.
• Runs on HTTPS; if not, upgrade your site to function on HTTPS
• It does not share data with a third-party app.

Now, this was all about the eCommerce strategies that you should employ to attract users’ attention and experience greater sales and higher revenues. One thing you need to take care of is after-sales service and support.

Customer Engagement – Work On Retention

You might think that once the sale is completed, your job comes to an end. However, reality holds a different opinion. Customer experience is the aggregate of all the interactions a customer has with a brand, and this extends after the sale, too. Meaning that after the customer has placed an order, make sure that the product is delivered within the given time window.

Also, create customer engagement portals to promote one-to-one communication between the user and the representative so as to address issues. Finally, give them the ease to place returns or exchanges for the order. Optimize the reverse pickup and delivery so as to retain the customer’s trust.

What do we conclude?

Talking about the above, you will witness that the new normal eCommerce strategies have turned your business dormant. To map the pace of rising customers’ expectations and orchestrate your business in a customer-first policy, you need to transform your business tactics. Also, do not remain under the impression that old is gold. This adage is long gone, and today, you need to stay abreast with all the trends to be the first choice of consumers. No doubt, the holiday is stressful long before it starts. But the benefits that come along with the season are worth every effort.

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